Have a look at the replays of all the goals. They all have one thing in common, which is that there's a pool of space around the Spurs scorer. Although Asteras did many things well, such as their crisp passing in midfield and their dissection of our offside trap, marking was not one of them (and finishing was not another). They just gave us way too much space in attack and when you have superior individual talent, that is how you score 5 goals with relative ease.
Now look at the contrast with a typical Premiership game, where Lamela (particularly) and Kane do not get 2m of comfort-zone in every direction and do not get to spend 0.75 seconds weighing up their decisions; 'I know: why don't I try a rabona?'
Kane is good at working space anyway, it's one of his main attributes and is why he gets away with being quite slow and stills scores goals (see also: Keane, Robbie). But it was a luxury for him that he sometimes had a choice of spaces to drift into.
For Lamela, it's an object-lesson: he absolutely must learn how to deliver this kind of inspiration even when he has two defenders all over him. It's the next step after his physical strength work during the off-season. He's nearly strong enough now, but he has to figure out how to do what he does in restricted spaces.
What was wrong with our defending was that our offside trap was very unreliable and we played a high line even after we had a 3 goal lead. Why would we want to do that? We had already shown that we could work opportunities without having to compress the play, so why push up even after Asteras had repeatedly shown that they could ping the ball neatly behind our defensive line?
Lloris 6.5 Loses a point for bad judgment, even though he was dumped in it by his defenders.
Dier 6 Some good moments, but messy offside trap timing.
Jan 6 OK, a bit anonymous.
Fazio 6.5 Extra half point for the assist.
Davies 5.5 Similarly to Dier, he doesn't quite get the offside trap, but also he drifted inside too often, tempting Asteras to ping numerous balls in behind our left side, which they duly did. Otherwise, good marking and decent passing.
Capoue 7 I can't work out why he is getting blamed by some for 'not protecting the defence'. Nearly all of Asteras' chances came from balls over the top or aerial balls in behind where Davies should have been. It's not Capoue's job to deal with these, indeed it's physically impossible for him to prevent them. His passing was sharp and his ball-winning was good. That's what he was there to deliver.
Dembélé 6.5 Although it was a good quality overall performance from Dembélé, winning and controlling possession and running the ball forward to relieve or apply pressure, he remains the most infuriating player to watch, because he simply cannot see when to release the ball. There must have been 5 occasions when everyone was willing him to shoot, or half the stadium could see an opportunity for him to play someone in, but instead he would take another few steps, dribble a bit further and ruin into a dead-end. If this man had better game-vision, he'd be a world-beater, but instead, he's just good. Finally, he unleashed a shot and it led to a goal. How long before he tries another one? A month?
Townsend 6 OK ernough, but a bit muted. Played his part, got one hard shot on target.
Lamela 7.5 As well as scoring his rabona and his volley, he worked hard, closed down and tried creative things. Just before his first goal, he had tried three creative moves in succession and failed to execute all of them, but he kept trying and finally things worked for him. Now he has to figure out how to do that under more physical pressure.
Kane 8 With every game, I have a stronger sense that Kane is going to be our no. 1 striker quite soon. As well as having a gift for finding the right place to be, he scores a variety of goals and plays multiple roles in our buildup (and I don't mean goalkeeper) and sees the game well. In the first half, he found himself in the right back position, looked up and sent a precise cross-field aerial about 50m to [can't remember who received it ... Davies?] running up the left. Lovely. And a hat trick. And probably a sleepless night...
Adebayor 6 He's not our point man for scoring goals in this formation. He's part of a rotating 4 man attack and his hold-up play and distracting presence are just as important as his [presently non-existent] goal-scoring. No one has mentioned his important assist, where he held the ball up under pressure from about 3 opponents for about 3 seconds, before squirting it to Lamela. He still has his uses, even while we wait for his goal-scoring touch to return.
It was plain that Pochettino issued instructions about pressing at half time. We hadn't been doing much of it until then and, in the first 10 minutes of the second half, everyone got right in Asteras' faces in midfield. Why don't they do it from the first whistle? It's not a 'philosophy' that takes months to learn, they just have to remember/bother to do it.
It was fun game to watch and quite relaxing because we were ahead from so early.